Remembering Westwood, Canada's first racetrack

Long gone but not forgotten.

It's Monday morning in a hillside subdivision in Coquitlam, British Columbia, and kids have been kicked out of the house. "Go play outside!" They take to their bikes, head to the park, or, this being Canada after all, set up a couple of nets and play a little street hockey. Every so often, someone yells "Car!" and the nets are pulled aside.

"Car!": a Toyota Corolla. "Car!": a Dodge Grand Caravan. "Car!": the ghost of Keke Rosberg's Formula Atlantic, screaming down the straight with Villeneuve and the rest of the pack in hot pursuit.

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That's what you get for building a housing development over an old racetrack.

The very first motorsport events in Canada were held at airports in the early 1950s. For the fledgling Sports Car Club of B.C., the flat, tire-shredding surfaces were nothing like European tracks. Competition may have been fierce, but conditions were hardly world-class.

With Crown land available on the cheap, the club raised funds to lease a large parcel on a local hillside. Fifteen miles outside Vancouver, bulldozers carved out a racecourse, smack-dab in the middle of a Pacific-Northwest rainforest. When it opened in July 1959, Westwood Motorsport Park was Canada's first purpose-built racetrack.

Westwood was one of the fastest circuits in North America, heart-shaped and incorporating many of the most challenging elements of more famous racing venues.

Starting out from the pits, either at a flying start or grid-style, racers picked up speed through a sweeping left and set a line for the banked carousel. Overenthusiastic drivers might be flung into the swamp on the right or into the trees at the top of the carousel. Westwood's lack of runoff was champion Indy racer Bobby Rahal's single complaint.

Kinking past the clubhouse, the track then ran through Valley Corner Curve, a long, downhill curve that fired the cars into the main straight like a slingshot. With almost no banking, conditions could be treacherous in the wet. And remember, the circuit was built in a rainforest.

Flying along the straight was no simple task either. Halfway down, as Vmax approached, a combination crest and kink (known as Deer's Leap) could send man and machine airborne. From there, it was a first-gear sharp hairpin, then up through the esses in a climb to barrel past the pits, the stands, and the last LeMans-style starting grid to be used in North America.

As a track built and maintained by club racers, Westwood would always have a close-knit family atmosphere, different from the many commercial operations that sprung up around the same time. Public interest in circuit racing grew rapidly. Stirling Moss visited in the early going and even now remembers the beauty of the racetrack in the Canadian wilderness.

Many American racers would make their way north to test their mettle at Westwood. Pete Lovely, a Seattle-based racer best known for winning the inaugural 1957 race at Laguna Seca, held the track record in a Cooper-Ferrari. In the heyday of early-1960s racing, spectators were treated to the sights of Maseratis, Aston-Martins, Porsches, and Jaguars all battling for position.

Later, as American V8 power revolutionized motorsports, Cobras and GT40s would rip through the forest, joined soon by purpose-built specials like the Chinook.

Formula Atlantic, CART, NASCAR, and early F1 cars all ran at Westwood, with many amateur racers taking part in Formula Ford racing. This was the circuit's golden era. A dog-eared copy of a 1978 program outlines a wild battle that included spins, crashes, cars going end-over-end, and finally, F1-champ-to-be Keke Rosberg's clean pass to take the eventual win.

Gone but Not Forgotten

When the housing boom hit in the late 1980s, real-estate values skyrocketed and the Westwood track lost its lease to a developer. That was the end of the circuit. Most of the streets in the residential area that are there now have typical names like Chickadee, Maple, and Dogwood. Others echo the site's plowed-over past: Carousel Crescent, Paddock Drive, and Deer's Leap Place.

Each year, British Columbia's vintage racing society—formed in 1976 at Westwood—takes to the confines of the only remaining local track, itself constantly under threat from developers. Here, old thoroughbreds run and old campaigners recount battles: Villeneuve's hard-charging style, the insanely powerful machines of Trans-Am, the time a bull moose wandered out of the woods and chased a Formula Vee around the circuit (that yarn may not actually have happened).

The past comes to life, engines once more race to the redline, and Canada's first racetrack lives on, if only in memory.